Editing organazized – Alex Gollner's 2007-2013 blog

iOS 6 Maps: How to submit missing information and corrections

If you’ve updated your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to iOS 6, you’ll find the Maps app uses new data. It is likely that if you have local knowledge, you find errors and missing information. The new data is much less comprehensive than the Google Maps data the app used until now.

Eventually errors will be fixed and many more points of interest will be added. To speed the process, Apple have included ways for us to submit information and corrections.

Points of interest shown at incorrect location

If you see that a business, park, station, hospital or other point of interest is shown at an incorrect location, you can send Apple the correct location.

Tap the blue right-facing arrow to see point of interest details.

Swipe down to the bottom of the window.

Tap the Report a Problem button.

Tap the Pin is at incorrect location option and tap Next.

As well as dragging the pin, you can pinch and drag the map to change scale and position.

Tap Send to send the correction to Apple.

Missing Point of Interest

If you know of a destination that’s missing from iOS maps, you can submit its location to Apple.

Navigate the map to the location of the missing point of interest and tap the page curl at the bottom left of the screen.

Tap Drop Pin to define the approximate location.

Drag the dropped pin to the correct location.

Tap the blue right-facing arrow of your dropped pin to see point of interest details.

Swipe to the bottom of the window.

Tap the Report a Problem button.

Select Information is incorrect, tap Next.

Enter any information you have on the missing point of interest.

If the point of interest has a website, you can enter its URL. Perhaps Apple will use this to confirm the information you’ve entered.

You can also choose which icon appears next to the point of interest using the category field. Tap it to see a list.

There are many categories, so type in a few letters to reduce the length of the list.

Tap the category you want to assign.

Tap Send to send the information to Apple.

As it is early days for this process, there’s no way of knowing how Apple will deal with people submitting map information and corrections. I imagine to prevent pranking, they’ll have rules to decide whether to make changes based on your submissions.

Agreed. A lot of us can be bothered, but it’s probably a lot of the same people that were making all the corrections in Google Maps for the last 5 years. I think everyone forgets how bad Google Maps was originally until we all moved pins, corrected errors and added missing locations.

You filled in the one piece of the puzzle that was missing – thanks! What was missing is that to relocate a pin at an incorrect location you _tap_the_pin_first_. Nowhere is this obvious, since the prompt is “drag te pin to the correct location” – which to te uninitiated implies the pin is already selected. Nice work!

Two things will delay the first corrections: Apple having enough people to go through the submissions, corrections needing corroboration. For copyright reasons I don’t think pointing Apple to another map to show a missing item or a correction location is allowed. If one in 10,000 iOS users submits a series of corrections, that’s a lot of data to go through and they’ll probably use independent verification before updating. That means areas with higher population density will be fixed more quickly as it’s more likely that there’s someone near who submits the same information.

I tried correcting the location of a church today, 4 miles misplaced. I gave the correct address but couldn’t move the pin as the quality of the satellite image was not good enough to locate the correct position. What I really want is a web based correction feature so I can do it from home with a much bigger screen.

There needs to be a more broad category for correction as well. For example, they have a whole region of Indonesia listed wrong (probably more than one). West Kalimantan is a province, they have it listed as South Kalimantan, which does not exist. It’s not feasible to go through and correct every single entry in the province.

Have you found any direct contact address to address larger categorical errors?

I have tried many times, but it is not easy to move the purple pin – it is very user un-friendly. I tapped, I dragged, I pinched – nothing helps. It is very tricky to move the purple pin. If Apple wants users to help them fix their maps, maybe they should fix the way this purple pin works first!

The maps app uses location information from Yelp; reporting the location problems on Yelp is actually the quicker and preferred method, since it’s like “cutting out the middle-man”. However, I’m more interested on how to report bad road locations, and this does not state any information on how to do that.

I submitted a problem in December of last year. Every car that comes down our street we help them report the problem. Apple has done nothing to fix this major mixed use area in Atlanta with restaurants, businesses and movie theaters.